From the Moab Times-Independent
Thursday, May 18, 2000What's that glow on the truck in the next lane?
Radioactive containers rolled up Main Street
Officials say public was not endangeredby Franklin Seal staff writer
Investigators at a nuclear cleanup site in Tonawanda, N.Y. found that a number of empty inter-modal containers returning from the White Mesa mill south of Blanding were contaminated with radioactive material and failed to meet radiation-level safety regulations.
But before those radioactive containers got to New York, they had to make their way up Moab's Main Street.
The containers, used to transport radioactive waste from Tonawanda to White Mesa, are shipped by rail to Cisco, then transferred onto trucks, which haul them down Highway 191 through the heart of Moab and on to the mill. After the material is dumped, the empty containers are hauled back to Cisco and shipped to Tonawanda where they are used again.
Both Utah State regulators and mill representatives say the "hot" material found on the outside surface of the containers was probably radioactive mud. They say the mud most likely was splashed up there after the containers were cleaned at the mill.
Neither the regulators nor the company characterized the containers as posing a significant danger to the public.
But Pack Creek Ranch resort owner Ken Sleight has been ringing alarm bells about those incidents and other problems at the mill. He gave a report on the situation to the San Juan County Commission last week; the commissioners dismissed his concerns.
Sleight had heard rumors about problems at White Mesa and emailed Utah's Division of Radiological Control last February. In DRC's reply, Sleight learned that not only was the rumor he'd heard true, but there had been other incidents as well.
During a telephone interview Saturday, Bill Sinclair, director of DRC, confirmed that he wrote Sleight about White Mesa. He also said there were three contaminated-container "incidents" that occurred in February and March. But there was one "as late as a couple of weeks ago," he added.
"Boston Box" incident
He also confirmed another, unrelated incident that took place last October. A container of hazardous material from Boston was mistaken for one of the Tonawanda containers and accidentally shipped to White Mesa.
The lead-contaminated soil slipped past two checkpoints: one at the Cisco off-loading site, and one at the mill. It was then dumped in with the radioactive waste. The error was discovered "some days later," possibly as much as a week later, and immediately reported to both Sinclair's office and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Sinclair says he has told International Uranium Corporation, which owns the mill, to "get it out of there." But seven months later, the lead-contaminated soil that came from The Boston Tunnel Project, still sits at White Mesa caught in a regulatory backwater.
IUC President Ron Hochstein says his company is closing in on a plan to dispose of the material. "We're working with the NRC, the state, I.T. Corp [the contractor at the site in Tonawanda] and the transportation contractor, MHF, on a segregation plan. We're hoping to have resolution of the situation within four to six weeks."
The "Boston Box" incident as it has become known, did not cause Sinclair to be concerned for public safety. But the fact that the container was routed to White Mesa in the first place and subsequently slipped past two checkpoints, is unsettling, he says. "In all my days dealing with radioactive materials, I've never known of any instance that's this bizarre."
Safety implications?
Do the contaminated containers, taken together with the "Boston Box" incident and a tipped container last fall point to anything amiss at White Mesa? "It appears they've had some problems," Sinclair admits.
IUC's Hochstein downplays any possibility of danger from any of the problems. He says both MHF, which manages the offloading site in Cisco, and White Mesa have instituted "new protocols" to check shipments as they arrive to make sure they're what they should be. And crews at White Mesa are now reportedly following a different procedure in washing out the containers. They now get two external washes, a "more thorough visual check" and truck drivers use a different route in leaving the mill property with the empties.
The CEO says the majority of those new protocols were instituted in February, shortly after the first of the containers were discovered in New York. But does that mean the contaminated containers discovered later, up to two weeks ago, were processed under the new rules? Hochstein said without tracing the paperwork he did not know. It is always possible those containers were already in the railroad system prior to enacting the new safety procedures, he answers.
And, he insists, his company has had no reports of any "releases" - which means no one has called in about dried radioactive mud falling off a truck as it rolls down the highway.
Further, he says, IUC can't be sure that the radioactive material even originated at White Mesa. Many of the truck drivers park their rigs at home, including the container. For all his company knows, the material could have come from a truck driver's yard. "We haven't totally discounted the fact that some of this mud may have been picked up at other sites. A lot of these people have been in uranium mining for years." After all, he adds, something could have fallen off a truck into their yards years ago, then splashed up onto the containers years later. Also, he continues, the radioactive level of the material was "close to background radiation in the area."
And yet, IUC is "taking it very seriously, even though it was a very small amounts," he says.
Alternative feeding frenzy?
Hochstein also confirmed his company has received notice that the NRC approved it's application to receive further shipments of "alternative feed" materials from a large cleanup site in St. Louis. IUC also has two other applications pending - one for a site in Tennessee, and another for the "Linde" site, part of the complex of sites in Tonawanda that includes the Ashland 1 and 2 sites which are currently being shipped to White Mesa.
The Linde site was part of the weapons production facility of the secret Mahattan Project. But Sinclair says, even if the NRC approves the license application and the decommissioned Linde facility material is shipped through Moab to White Mesa, he does not think that material will be substantially different from the Ashland 1 and 2 material - "if the NRC has done a good enough job" of screening the application.
Sinclair also said that his office, upon advise from legal counsel, has decided not to appeal a recent NRC ruling that upholds the general practice of "alternative feed" processing. He said DRC lawyers didn't think they could win in District Court.
Utah has opposed the "alternative feed" practice, which regulators view as simply an end run around state laws that control the disposal of low-level nuclear waste within Utah.
The NRC has said any low-level nuclear waste can be "processed" at an operating uranium mill. And Sinclair adds that the NRC has no bottom limit - virtually any detectable amount of uranium in waste material is okay.
But Sinclair still says that White Mesa, "is a uranium mill that's acting like a waste facility." And he's concerned a trend developing with other Utah uranium mills. The Shootaring facility at Ticaboo Canyon, also wants to start accepting low-level radioactive wastes. Sinclair says that trend is no accident. "It's become a trend because the NRC has allowed it to be.